Interesting times as cloud gets a little clearer

You have heard us talk about the energy around the virtual data center and how orchestration is an important component in the drive toward IT as a service (ITaaS) or cloud. In fact, we built our “proving what’s doable in the cloud” campaign and Datalink on Demand Labs Cloud using those solution stacks. One of the challenges around delivering ITaaS/Cloud for many organizations is visibility into what orchestration tools will prevail long term.

VMware has vCloud, which is a suite of solutions to enable cloud solutions.

Microsoft has recently launched System Center 2012, which is getting a lot of attention.

The Big 4 (BMC, CA, Tivoli and HP OpenView) all have solutions to provide orchestration within their frameworks.

There are many startups including one we have mentioned in the past, Cloupia.

Datalink’s position has always been to represent best-of-breed solutions and a level of flexibility for our customers. For example, in Datalink on Demand Labs we have FlexPod (Cisco, NetApp), VSPEX (Cisco, EMC), VSCAPE (Cisco, Server, Storage), UCP (Cisco HDS) and VBLOCK (Cisco, EMC, VMware) as unified architectures that form the foundation for cloud infrastructure. We then built out Datalink on Demand Labs, which is a cloud, on what we consider two best-of-breed solutions — VMware vCloud and Cloupia CUIC. While Cloupia was a startup, it offered additional flexibility not supported by VMware until the recent acquisition of Dynamic Ops — the ability to orchestrate other hypervisors and physical, as well as virtual infrastructure.

The challenge for many large organizations considering Cloupia was clarity on where it would be in three to five years as a startup, competing with the likes of HP, IBM, CA, BMC, VMware and even Cisco. The announcement today of Cisco’s intent to acquire Cloupia and integrate it into the Data Center Business Group provides clarity. This aligns with most of the best-of-breed unified solution stacks, including FlexPod, VBLOCK, VSPEX, VSCAPE and UCP and Cisco, and provides the ability to execute, to complement Cloupia’s visionary solution.

Needless to say we are thrilled we invested in this innovative solution and excited we can continue to provide best-of-breed solutions to our enterprise customers.